8000 B.C.

Schematic;

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As computers accelerate and software becomes more sophisticated, we're nearing the point where you can create any sound you could ever imagine. From the evidence on Otto Von Schirach's 8000 B.C., this young man from Miami can imagine many, many sounds, and he knows how to translate what he hears in his head into 1s and 0s.

In terms of the diversity of sounds produced, 8000 B.C. is an impressive display of programming skill. But then, so was Linux, and yet I've never felt inclined to pour over the code. Perhaps some endeavors are so entwined with technical mastery that only technical masters can truly appreciate it. From where I sit, 8000 B.C. feels like that kind of record. This is dense, frenetic IDM for those obsessed with nothing so much as change.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that a single track here might contain more than 100 individual patches, each of which is manipulated in a number of ways. Obviously, when you're dealing with these kinds of numbers, you're not going to have much open space left over. And master tape saturation seems to be one of the goals of 8000 B.C. This isn't a bad thing in itself, but what's missing for me is any sense of a relationship between the various elements. They seem so interchangeable, like a single Cubase track could be cut and pasted from any one of these pieces into another and the result would be the same.

Half these tracks are nearly indistinguishable from one another, crammed with every possible permutation of buzz, click, thwack and blurp. And these I just have to let slide by, occasionally pricking up my ears when I hear an interesting rhythmic combination amidst the chaos.

But there are a handful of interesting spots. "Schemotropolis Mirage" reminds me of the Two Lone Swordsman's take on electro, taking the futurist genre that outpaced the technology of its time and yanking it into the 21st century. And it wisely leaves plenty of breathing room in between robotic drum hits, and adds eerie, almost RZA-like synthesized strings to actually create a mood. "No Wood" follows with the most ambient mood on 8000 B.C., an interesting slice of musique concrète that effectively suggests uneasiness without resorting to annoyance. Beyond that, Otto Von Schirach has crafted a lot of technically sophisticated music that strikes me as aesthetically cold and lifeless. Sure, it's a computer world, but where's the computer love?